THE LITERARY WORK
OF PIERRE-MARC DE BIASI

Imagined as an opportunity to celebrate the book, Pierre-Marc de Biasi’s text travels through the extraordinary twists and turns of the book’s millennial history to then illustrate its purpose through an example by following, step by step, the birth of a literary masterpiece: The Legend of Saint Julien The Hospitaller, first of Gustave Flaubert's Three Tales. Comment naît un livre ? thus offers the reader an immersive experience into the realities of literary creation, tracing—step by step—the dreams and emotions of a narrator grappling with the crafting of a story, including all the deletions, second thoughts, and dazzling breakthroughs of an author striving for his stylistic ideal.

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A specialist in Flaubert’s manuscripts, Pierre-Marc de Biasi thus reveals the circumstances, processes, and transformations through which a literary text is born in a writer’s mind—how it seeks its path, invents itself, develops, and evolves until it achieves its final form, before ultimately taking the physical shape of a book. Reproduced in a quality close to that of the original autographs held by the BnF, and illuminated by a detailed, step-by-step account of their genesis, the facsimiles and transcriptions of the scenarios, drafts, and fair copies of the opening of La Légende de saint Julien l’Hospitalier allow us to witness the emergence of Flaubert’s tale for the first time— just as if we were looking over the shoulder of the master at work, observing his every movement.